Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ruled on 8/11 that the depositions of
Bill Gates and 16 other Microsoft executives must be opened to the
public and the media
[1].
The 1913 Sherman Antitrust Act gave him
very little leeway, he said. Depositions were to have begun on 8/12,
but have been put off until lawyers for the two sides can work out
how to protect Microsoft's proprietary information in an open forum.
The open hearing was requested by the New York Times, the Seattle
Times, and other media companies. Microsoft has appealed this
ruling; Judge Jackson, no fan of media in a courtroom, had in fact
given them subtle encouragement to do so.

A reader suggested that the hearings should be televised over the
Web using RealVideo. A fine idea that would not be allowed. The
ground rules for the open hearing are similar to those for
old-fashioned trials: no cameras and no tape recorders.

Because of the delay sure to be introduced by open depositions,
both sides in the case have requested a two-week delay in the start
of the trial
[2];
the judge did not immediately assent.

Note added 1998-08-20:

A federal appeals court will hear arguments on the question
of open depositions, but meanwhile has set aside
Judge Jackson's order. The liklihood is that the most
sensitive depositions, of Bill Gates and CEO Steve
Ballmer -- if not indeed those of all 17 executives -- will
take place before the appellate court even hears the matter.

Bruce Perens, who led the Debian Linux effort for a time, had been
working on the Linux Standard Base, a standard for binary Linux
distributions. The effort was somewhat controversial and one
editorialist has opined
[3]
that Perens lost the support of the LSB
working group when he took entirely upon himself the task of
building the reference distribution. Whatever the truth of the matter,
two engineers, from Red Hat and Debian, mutinied in favor of a more
open process that their organizations have now endorsed as the
Linux Compatibility Standards Project [4].
At the same time Perens
resigned from Software in the Public Interest, the Debian legal
front-end which he himself had founded in 1996; two other SPI
officers also departed.

As usual, Slashdot is the place to turn for informed commentary on
Open Source culture
[5].
The consensus in this community as I read
it is that Perens's LSB was too rigid. The LCS approach is given a
better chance of reducing unnecessary divergence among Linux
distributions. There is little disagreement that diversity is a
benefit.

Erik Troan (Red Hat) and Dale Scheetz (Debian) will jointly manage
an LCS working group coordinated via an open mailing list -- to
subscribe, email lcs-eng-request@lists.debian.org with subject:
subscribe.

A report by Saul Hansell in the 8/16 NY Times (front page, below
the fold) documents a trend guaranteed to disturb those concerned
about online privacy
[6].
Some very large commercial sites have
agreed to feed information about their customers' reading,
shopping, and entertainment habits into a system called Engage that
is already tracking the movements of 30 million Internet users
by means of cookies. This program is a perfect exemplar of the
kind of application for cookies that Net privacy advocates have
long warned of (and cookie-loving Webmasters have long disparaged).
CMG Information Services's Engage system in theory guarantees
anonymity, but it would be trivial to abuse. GeoCities (rhymes with
"atrocities") and Lycos-Tripod between them will bring over 29
million additional Net users under the guns of the target marketers.
Note that the NY Times site itself requires free registration and
makes you bite the cookie to get to content.

If builders built like programmers wrote, then the first woodpecker
to come along would destroy all civilization. I forget who wrote that,
but here is my cookiepecker. It
gently scrambles your cookie file, and then you can listen for the distant
sound of crashing web servers. Works on netscape on linux using perl 5.

A source at Global Communications says that Priori is about to file
for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. For those not steeped in US backruptcy law,
this means: lights out, doors locked, assets sold to pay creditors.
Their Web site was down as of 8/14 but their network was still
operating. ZDNet carried the only mainstream reporting
[7] I saw on these
events.

Patrick Gilmore, former director of operations for Priori, posted
these points to the NANOG mailing list on Friday 8/14:

Priori has not filed for bankruptcy, but likely will Friday
or Monday barring a miracle.

I turned off our web page.

The backbone is running and has a high likelihood of
continuing to run until at least 3 PM PDT, Friday, 8/14, 1998.
After that, I do not know.

The employees are all laid off. (I'm technically unemployed --
so I can't be speaking for "the company"! ;)

All customers have been notified.

And Gilmore thanked the NANOG members who had worked above and
beyond the call to make sure Priori's customers wouldn't be
stranded when the plug exits the wall:

Thank you all for the tremendous response. With your help I have
gotten all of my customers moved so that not one Priori customer
should suffer any significant downtime. (Just long enough to move
the line.) I do appreciate everyone's offer of help. Kinda
restores my faith in the industry.

I would like to single out Above.Net, specifically Dave Rand and
Steve Rubin. Above.Net is helping our customers in ways I would
not expect any profit-minded company to do. They are bending over
backwards to help people who will probably never pay them a dime,
and doing it quickly and cheerfully. These are really good guys
and I think they deserve a lot of credit for helping me and my
downstreams out of a VERY tight spot. Thanx guys.

Of course, there are lots of other upstreams who are making
extraordinary efforts to keep one or more of my downstreams on
Net in the near future. Please do not think that I do not
appreciate it. Thank you all.

Many thanks to my evil twin Jeff Schult <jeff at tftb dot com> for first
word on this story.

Logitech has acquired the QuickCam business from Connectix for $25M
[8].
And Lycos has purchased WhoWhere for $133M [9],
along with its
community subsidiary Angelfire, which ranked number one in a recent
survey of the 50 fastest-growing Web sites [10].
Angelfire's 1.3M
members catapult Lycos near the front of the pack in the portal wars
now raging unchecked on a Web near you.

According to a Computerworld story [11],
within the last three days
Andersen Consulting has adopted a global policy of accepting no new
year 2000 consulting work. The fear is that clients whose systems
fail when the century turns might sue the consultancy. Spokesmen
for Andersen would not confirm that such a policy exists.

Notes

It's the silly season for politics and for reporting. Cities empty out
and email dries up. The news this week isn't particularly silly, but
it is thin.

TBTF's Siliconia feature[12]
inspired and was linked from an
excellent piece of reportage in Wired titled Silicon Envy (pp. 136-137
in the September issue). The magazine plotted various Silicon Valley
wannabes on a world map, including some not yet tracked on the
Siliconia page, and assigned each a 1-to-10 ranking based on infrastructure,
business density, schools, and ethos. Who's on top? North Texas, New
York, and Kempele, Finland.